Searching for pharmaceutically active products and metabolites in environmental waters of Peru by HRMS-based screening: Proposal for future monitoring and environmental risk assessment

The presence of pharmaceutical active products (PhACs) in the aquatic environment is a matter of current concern, and there is an increasing trend to include these compounds in water quality monitoring programs and environmental risk assessments. Several studies have reported the presence of PhACs in environmental waters worldwide, but only a few studies have focused on Latin American countries. Thus, available information on the occurrence of parent pharmaceuticals, especially their metabolites, is very scarce. Peru is one of the less monitored countries in terms of contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) in waters, and only one study has been found, which was focused on the quantification of selected PhACs in urban wastewater and surface water. The aim of this work is to complement the previous data reported on PhACs in the aquatic environment by application of a wide-scope high-resolution (HRMS)-based screening, making use of target and suspect approaches. In the present work, 30 pharmaceuticals, drugs or other compounds (sweeteners, UV filters, etc.) and 21 metabolites have been identified, with antibiotics (and metabolites) being the most prevalent compounds. The use of liquid chromatography (LC) coupled to ion mobility-HRMS allowed the tentative identification of parent compounds and metabolites, for which the analytical reference standard was not available, with a high level of confidence in their identification. Based on the results obtained, a strategy for the monitoring of PhACs and relevant metabolites in environmental waters from Peru and for subsequent risk assessment is proposed. Our data will also help to focus future studies to evaluate the removal efficiency of wastewater treatment plants and the impact of treated water in receiving water bodies.